Review: Yonder Mountain String Band under the highway in Albany

By Greg Haymes

Published 3:56 pm, Friday, July 10, 2015

Albany

After taking a week off due to the Fourth of July holiday, the Alive at Five concert series came roaring back on Thursday with a blast of blazing bluegrass breakdowns courtesy of the Yonder Mountain String Band.

Unfortunately, the rain forced the relocation of the concert to the parking lot at the Corning Preserve Boat Launch under the I-787 highway.

At the start of their set, bassist Ben Kaufmann joked, "Welcome to the show under the overpass." And the rain site is unquestionably the most inhospitable concert venue in the Capital Region, as the music competed with the rumbling of cars and trucks overhead, as well as the steady roar of vendors' generators. And the concrete setting adds an insurmountable reverb to the sound, which wreaks havoc with the mix — especially with upper-register bluegrass instruments like the mandolin and banjo.

The crowd: I've never seen so many Grateful Dead T-shirts at a non-Dead concert.

But by the end of the show, even Kaufmann grudgingly admitted, "It's way better than not getting to play music at all." The crowd agreed with him.

Reconstituted with the recent addition of fiddler Allie Kral and mandolin master Jacob Jolliff following last year's departure of founding member Jeff Austin, the veteran Yonder Mountain String Band is a bluegrass band with definite jam-band leanings. They opened with the uptempo narrative "On the Run," extending the instrumental soloing over an acoustic groove for 10 minutes. The following tune reached the 20-minute mark.

They're on tour in support of their new album, "Black Sheep," and those new tunes — especially "Insult and an Elbow" and the magnificent "Drawing a Melody" — were definite highlights. Far-and-away the stunner of the night was a sprawling, rip-roaring rendition of Bruce Springsteen's early "It's Hard to Be a Saint in the City" with Bob Dylan's "Spanish Harlem Incident" sewn into the middle by Jolliff's most avant-garde playing of the night. Simply epic.

Looking like a scraggly quartet of mountain men relectant to leave their moonshine still unattended, Saranac Lake's charmingly rambunctious Blind Owl Band opened the evening with an hour of righteously ragged foot-stompin' music.